Ask any one of us and we’ll tell you that the liquor went down easily the last hour of that year’s holiday party. High from Danny’s stale weed, agitated by the new information (even misinformation) about Nora, we found ourselves gulping what was meant to be sipped. Every time we glanced at our wives and were given the gentle but unmistakable shake of the head that no, it was not yet time to leave, we found our way to the makeshift bar in the kitchen, pouring whatever the guest before us had left out—eggnog, hot rum toddy, straight warm gin—into our tumblers.

  In spite of that, in spite of our too-ready gullets and our lubed-up heads, there were certain other details about that party that have stayed with us. Details, surprisingly, that had nothing to do with Nora. And not just details like the fact that the chili pepper–shaped lights gave off an eerie pink glow (Was it the Rutherfords? Were they that tacky already? Or were they being ironic? Surely someone must remember at whose house this all took place?), but details, for instance, like the fact that Trey Stephens was there. We were still ten years away from the things he’d do with Paul Epstein’s daughter, then only three years old. But it’s the sort of thing one remembers later, when the crime is finally committed, when the past is recounted, reviewed, reevaluated, and sometimes even revised. As in, That party? Jesus. Wasn’t Trey Stephens at that party? Can you imagine? Jesus. If only we’d known. And perhaps that, more than anything, was the refrain that was and should be reserved for Trey. If only we’d known. But we didn’t know. We never know. No matter how many times we revisit that party or any other. The fact is, until it happened, until Trey changed how we viewed him, how we viewed and view ourselves—as men, as fathers, as friends and husbands—we could never know enough to change the outcome. Not his. Not ours. Certain outcomes are unavoidable, invariable, absolutely unaffectable, and yet completely unpredictable. Certain outcomes are that way. But maybe not Nora’s. Maybe she was the only one who escaped; who had the chance to become something not completely inevitable. Maybe. Or maybe she died when she was sixteen years old in a snowstorm that overtook her, in a foreign grouping of trees, close to the water, a mere two counties over.

  But forget Nora for now. That’s the point. Even without Nora, that party was memorable also because Chuck Goodhue—the one who’d been so quick to break Paul Epstein’s heart in high school, by spreading the news of Sissy and Kevin Thorpe in the Jeffreys’ mudroom—was caught necking with Minka Dinnerman in the upstairs guest bedroom. Minka was unmarried, but Chuck’s new bride was downstairs. Ironically it had been Paul who walked in on the pair, which now explains his outburst in the basement, but didn’t explain it at the time. Paul kept his mouth shut about what he’d seen until five years later, at Minka’s funeral.

  He wasn’t being cruel when he put his hand on Chuck’s shoulder and said, “I’m sorry. I know she meant something to you.” And he hadn’t meant to be obvious either, but when Chuck wiped away what looked like a tear and when his wife turned red and walked away, we all understood what must have happened. And in case we hadn’t put it together then, we definitely put it together a few hours later, in Paul’s basement, where we held a wake of our own in honor of Minka, not having been invited to the family-only event being held at the Dinnerman house, hosted no doubt by that now older, still gorgeous Russian beauty, Mrs. Dinnerman.

  In Paul’s basement, safely out of earshot of Chuck or his wife (because of course they didn’t come; they were already too busy trying to repair the injuries of a five-year infidelity), Paul told us what he’d seen.

  “So it’s been going on that long,” said Winston Rutherford. “I figured it out last year, but Chuck said it was a one-time thing.” And for some reason this turned the wake even more morose than Minka’s death itself. As if the realization that there’s so much that we didn’t—that we don’t—know that it’s frightening, that it’s distancing and isolating and sad.

  But we were five years from that specific isolation, and back at the Christmas party with the chili pepper–shaped lights and the weirdly oily hors d’oeuvres, we found ourselves milling about the basement and then milling about the living room. We were thinking about Nora Lindell, every one of us convinced we were the only one, and the thought all the more tender because of it. We were thinking about Mumbai and all those people and the noise and the heat and the smell, and we were imagining ourselves there in it. We were imagining our own café table, our own chai tea and straw, our own glimpse of Nora, safe, alive, alone. We could feel the sweat forming on our upper lips. We could hear the screaming, the dull, directionless moaning of people scrambling for cover. We could feel the explosions, the thud of fear in our hearts. My god, yes, we could see Mumbai clear as day, a city in smoke, a city in ruins.

  15

  Maybe, in Mumbai, Nora Lindell danced. She drank, too, maybe. She wore saris and bracelets and sandals. And when she danced or drank or danced and drank, the bracelets jangled together the entire length of her arms. Perhaps she called herself Trinka, a name that was meaningless, that she’d pulled from the air, like it had always been there, waiting to be taken. She’d gained weight since Arizona, if Arizona had existed at all. The point is, she’d gained weight since us, since high school. She’d grown taller, wider, more feminine. The breasts she’d never wanted had also grown. And, in spite of herself, she admired them. She wore clothes to complement them, to complement the fact that she was—whether or not she liked it—a woman. Thin-strapped dresses and weightless T-shirts. Somehow, her gender didn’t matter in India. She was something other than a woman in India. She was an outsider. She was a foreigner. She could do anything she wanted, and the attention, when she danced, was exhilarating.

  Who knows how she got there or how long she’d been there before the bombings? Maybe she had gotten there by way of Arizona and a couple of babies. Maybe by way of the man in the Catalina. Maybe she’d been there since the year she went missing, or maybe she arrived only a few months before the bombings. Who knows?

  What matters is that when she got to Mumbai she would have started drinking, taken up dancing, begun wearing dresses that were loose and tight at the same time, that hugged her body even as her body was finally allowed to move freely. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, somewhere in the dancing and the drinking and the sheer enjoyment of life as it is meant to be lived, Nora Lindell would have fallen in love. She would have fallen in love with a woman. Why? Simple. Because we are men. And so let us say that she fell for a woman. A henna tattoo artist who worked in a small room across from the hotel where Nora stayed.

  “American,” the tattoo artist said one day. “American. Come here.”

  Nora crossed the street. It never would have occurred to her that she shouldn’t.

  “Are you teasing me with your body?” asked the tattoo artist. “Every day you walk by me and every day I am thinking you are teasing me.”

  Nora shook her head.

  “You have no answer,” said the woman. “Then I am right.”

  Nora shook her head again, perhaps she even laughed a little, charmed. A faint blush spread across her chest.

  “You are older the nearer you come, yes?”

  “I am not a child, if that’s what you mean,” said Nora. It was the first thing she had ever said to the woman. She would remember it always. I am not a child. Why had she said it? Hadn’t she wanted nothing more than to remain a child? Sitting in that Catalina, her future so unknown, hadn’t she wished to be stripped of sex, to be stripped of experience, of skin, of anything carnal? Hadn’t she wanted, even more, to become something genderless, something impossible and alien and innocent all at once? That girl was so far from her now. That childhood so much a thing of the past.

  The tattoo artist laughed. “No, you are not a child. With that body, you could never be a child. You were born a woman, I think. Born into that body to tease me.”

  Again Nora blushed. But probably, in spite of the flattery, she was annoyed. She was annoyed because she didn’t understand what the tattoo artist wanted or why she’d been called across the street. She was annoyed because she hadn’t realized, until the tattoo artist started speaking, that she was lonely. That she had been missing, for a very long time now, the simple act of verbal communication. And she was annoyed because she might have continued on just a little longer without making this realization, without the weight of loneliness suddenly upon her.

  The attraction was fast, complicated, inexplicable. It must have been the tattoo artist who made the first move because Nora wouldn’t have known how—man or woman, she wouldn’t have known how.

  The artist’s name was Abja. Abja Safia—“because I was born in water and my father would have me be chaste, which I am not,” she told Nora on the night they first met, lying on the floor, their backs against pillows, “because every name must mean something. Everything has meaning. You understand this. Yes?”

  “Yes,” said Nora.

  “Good, then you will stop calling yourself Trinka. It has no meaning.”

  The tattoo artist was dangerous in her intensity, which was probably what attracted Nora to her. Imagine her. Because we did. When our wives were not with us, when we were alone and momentarily unashamed, we imagined long fine limbs, aggressive foreign eyes. Perhaps we were simply imagining Mrs. Dinnerman, as we remembered her from our youth. We were imagining an Indian version of the Russian beauty—darker, fiercer, childless—a version even more special than the original because she was our own invention, our own creation, and we had no one else to share her with but Nora.

  The attraction made sense—to us, to anybody. Nora was Abja’s very own piece of untamed wilderness. Her very own America. She was something extraterrestrial and unfamiliar. And it’s true that Nora seemed somehow to be greater than her gender. Womanly, yes. But also so much more. Uncultivated, undomesticated, ungrounded. And already, that first night, they both felt the need to be in the same room as the other. And likewise, they both loved and hated that need for existing. It’s what we imagined love to be when we were still too young to know better. It’s what we always hoped for.

  “Your hotel room has ceiling fans, yes?” It was night. They were drunk, or maybe it was only Nora who was drunk. They were still lying on the floor, still lying against the pillows whose fabric stuck to their skin in a not-unpleasant way.

  “Yes,” said Nora, her arms in the air, the fingers of her right hand intermingled with the fingers of Abja’s left hand. She studied the way they joined together, the way they became something amorphous, something unified, and then the way they separated, the way she regained parts of her skin, finger by finger, until the hand was whole again, hers alone. “Ceiling fans.”

  “Good,” said Abja. “Then you will sleep there tonight. It is too hot here for an American. Go home now, but in the morning come back and I will henna you. I will make your skin match mine.”

  “I’m too tired to leave,” said Nora. “Why do you want me to leave?”

  “This is no place for an American at night.” Abja stood and in a single motion knotted a sari around her shoulders, covering her dark hennaed breasts.

  “I can’t remember seeing breasts before,” said Nora.

  “Your own, every day.”

  “That’s different.”

  “Your mother’s, then.”

  “She’s dead.”

  “Before she died, then.”

  “I can’t remember.”

  “Then remember mine. Now you have seen breasts.” Abja laughed. “And you should never forget them, and I will certainly not forget yours.”

  . . .

  Nora couldn’t remember how she got home that night. What she could remember was waking up, in the middle of the night, to the noises on the street. She had sweated, and under the breeze of the ceiling fan she shivered. She tried to remember her day, which she was able to do only in flashes. A sunrise. Trash. Banana peels and dark-skinned children. A glass of beer. Her feet. Her dirty toes. A woman. More glasses of beer. Pillows. Her own arms. Breasts.

  She shivered again. The memories were neither real nor not real. They were neither fond nor not fond. They were, however, a catalyst for the acid in her stomach to rise, to grab hold. She clutched at her gut and turned on her side. She was too tired, too lazy to move to the bathroom. Her body heaved. Nothing came. She pulled the blanket up around her shoulders and grabbed her knees. If the man in the Catalina had ever existed, if that night so long ago in the woods, in the clearing, in the snow, under the leaves, had ever really happened, then surely Nora would have remembered that night at just this moment, just as we can’t help but remember it. She would have remembered the fear, the cold. She would have remembered the way her body folded into itself for warmth, the way she shoved her knees into her chest and clutched at her elbows, reducing her surface area.

  But that’s only if the Catalina existed. If not, there’s no telling what she was thinking at that moment. Maybe her thoughts simply went to Abja. Maybe she was able to abandon mere images and begin to remember details, words, emotions. Maybe. The point is, this was the first night Nora ever remembered feeling her body was abandoning her. Even as she was finally discovering it, reclaiming it fully and robustly after a childhood during which she’d never wanted it, it was beginning already to disappear, weaken. She was scared, suddenly, by the possibility that there was less time than she’d imagined. Less time for her here, in India, but also here, alive, living. She thought briefly of her mother, but too much time had passed to be sad about that. She tried for a minute, but no specific feelings came. She thought next of Sissy—the first time in a very long time that she’d allowed herself to truly remember her sister. And this memory did the trick. It sharpened the pain in her breast, brought the tears to her eyes. But for some reason, the mere idea of Sissy made Nora’s own body feel even less significant, and it occurred to her that what she’d hoped was the aftereffect of too much beer, too much sun, was actually something more permanent, more sinister. There was something eating away at her. She couldn’t say what, but she felt quite sure that something uninvited had taken root inside. Her body heaved and the tears kept coming and, eventually, she slept.

  In the morning she walked across the street to the tattoo artist’s room, where she undressed and allowed the tattoo artist to change the color of her skin.

  16

  Mr. Lindell died. It’s perverse of course, but we were giddy with the news that the funeral would be in our town and not in the desert, in Arizona, where he died. The obituary was a thing of beauty. The kind of thing that receives attention that the deceased never received while living. We read it, then we read it again. We studied it. We looked for signs. We picked up the phone, we put the receiver back in its cradle. We looked for indications of ourselves in it, acknowledgments that we, too, had been part of his life.

  On Friday evening, June 16, at home and surrounded by his family, Herbert Hugh Lindell, age 67, quietly lost his year-long battle with pancreatic cancer. Born in Brunswick, Georgia, raised in Atlanta, Herbert lived with his daughter, Sissy, in Arizona, where he peacefully died.

  Though never one to seek out compliments or gestures of praise, I think he would not object to my relating that he was a stalwart and loyal friend, a true connoisseur of ethnic foods, a word savant, an honest lawyer, objective arbitrator, geopolitical maven, and splendid husband and father.

  In the words of his grandchildren, he was an all-right dude, a man among men. He will be sorely missed by his daughter, by his sister Nancy of Marietta, Ga., and by his many and adoring grandchildren.

  An open ceremony will be held in Herbert’s honor, as requested, in the mid-Atlantic.

  The sudden, unexpected use of the first-person haunted us. The obituary was Sissy’s handiwork; there was no doubt about that. And her simple use of the word I brought her voice, her body, her sheer strange existence back to us completely. But what caught us, what held us, what truly, truly disturbed us, was the inexplicable and undeniable absence of Nora Lindell from her father’s obituary.

  Sitting at our various kitchen tables that Sunday morning—our wives washing the baby in the sink or peeling potatoes for the dinner they’d been planning or sleeping in above us for the first time all week—we reread the obituary that had made its way from Arizona and wondered (even if only for a half second) whether we’d dreamed Nora Lindell into existence.

  It was our mothers who broke the spell. One telephone number at a time, the phone tree was resurrected. Mrs. Zblowski called Mrs. Boyd, who called Mrs. Epstein. And our mothers, in turn, called us, dutiful as ever to the prescription of the passage of information.

  “Did you see?” they asked.

  “See what?” we might have said, determined as ever to feign indifference.

  “The paper,” they said, impatient and unbelieving, the click of their nails audible as they struck one by one on their own kitchen tables. “Mr. Lindell.”

  “Oh, that,” we might have said, our wives furrowing their brows, wondering the reason for that Sunday’s particular interruption. Perhaps we rolled our eyes at them or shook our heads. Perhaps we made chatty hands at them, suggesting our mothers’ unwillingness to stop talking. Perhaps, but what we did not do was let on, was let slip, let show our absolute concentration on that obituary, its content, and whatever new information our mothers might have called to divulge.

  Our backs turned now towards our wives, we moved away from them, towards the foyer or the den or the basement even, and continued our conversation. “I saw it, sure, but I haven’t had a chance to read it,” we might have offered. “Did it say what he died of?”

 

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